Enculage (A Portrait of Deleuze and D. H. Lawrence)
(SA/2025) [1]
'Men should group themselves into a new order of sun-men ...
walking each in his own sun glory, with bright legs and uncringing buttocks' [2]
I.
The first thing to say is that Deleuze's writing is not always easy to understand.
Even the Google AI assistant admits that his work is difficult due to its density and the fact that he employs highly specialised language, makes numerous obscure references to other philosophers and disciplines, and rarely bothers to explain himself to the reader who is left to think through his esoteric concepts as best they can (filling in gaps and making vital connections as they go).
However, as with other French thinkers of his generation, I think one is rewarded if one only makes the effort and puts the time in to read Deleuze, carefully, and with a certain generosity of spirit. Of course there will be times when he'll make you roll your eyes or sigh with exasperation, but so too will there be moments of joy and revelation.
II.
From November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze gave a lecture-seminar series entitled Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought.
In the 14th of these seminars (there were fifteen in total), he discusses the two definitions of the body given us by Spinoza: one concerned with the relation of movement (i.e., the kinetic understanding of the body) and one concerned with the power of being affected (i.e., the dynamic understanding of the body) [3].
Half way through the seminar, however, Deleuze digresses in order to consider writers and artists who share an obsession with the sun and asks how their solar-infused thinking might connect to the work of Spinoza.
One of these writers is D. H. Lawrence and it's Deleuze's remarks on the Lawrence - someone he names along with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Artaud as a true heir to Spinoza (whether he knows it or not) - that most interest me here ...
III.
According to Deleuze, the body is composed not so much of organs, but of an infinity of extensive parts:
"These extensive parts belong to me according to a certain relation, but these extensive parts are perpetually subject to the influence of other parts which act upon them, and which don't belong to me."
So, to give a rudimentary example, skin is something Deleuze considers his and which forms an important part of his body. But the solar energetic particles that act as heat upon his skin are external forces. Skin cells might act "according to a certain relation that is precisely characteristic" of his body, but SEPs "have no other law than the law of external determinations".
Whenever one exclaims 'I'm hot!' one is admitting that an external body (the sun) acts on one's own body. To perceive that one's skin is beginning to burn is to become conscious of the fact that one inhabits a universe that is not mind dependent or under human control (and that one really should've applied some additional sunscreen).
Okay: so far, so straightforward; but also so what?
Well, according to Deleuze, this example allows us to gain a concrete understanding of what is meant by pantheism - a concept found not just in the work of Spinoza, but also in the writings of D. H. Lawrence; an author who not only "constituted for himself a kind of English pantheism" but also promoted his own form of sun-worship [4].
Deleuze wants to know how sun-loving pantheists like Lawrence live and feel and he posits there are "generally speaking, three ways of being in relation to the sun" ...
IV.
Firstly, there's the wrong way: the way of the majority of modern holidaymakers. Those whom Lawrence thinks vulgar and contemptible; those who lie naked like pigs on fashionable beaches:
"He finds that these people live poorly. There you have his idea. It was
also Spinoza's idea that people live poorly, and if they are wicked,
it's because they live poorly; fine. They live poorly, they dump
themselves onto the beach, and they understand nothing about the sun. If
they were to understand something about the sun, after all, says
Lawrence, they would come out of it more intelligent and improved."
As soon as they put their clothes back on, they are as grey and as filled with bitterness as before; "they lose nothing of their virtues and vices". Essentially, they remain at the most basic and naive level of knowledge and think of the sun as no more than some kind of tanning machine in the sky.
V.
The second manner of relating to the sun is one that is a bit more knowledgeable, though not merely in a theoretical or abstract sense; these people have a "practical comprehension of the sun" and, at the same time, they know how to compose the relations of their body in greater relation to the sun.
Such a person might be a 19th-century still life painter who goes out into nature:
"He has his easel; this is a certain relation. He has his canvas on the easel; this is another relation. There is the sun, and the sun does not remain immobile. Fine, so what is he going to do? What is it that I’m calling this knowledge of the second kind? He will completely change the position of his easel; that is, he is not going to have the same relation to his canvas depending on whether the sun is high, or the sun is about to set."
Van Gogh is a good example of such (even if he was eventually driven a little crazy by the sun) [5].
It was by being out in the elements and by lying on the ground in order to get just the right angle to paint the setting sun that Vincent learnt how to compose relations and raise himself to "a certain comprehension of causes". And it was only at that point that he could begin to describe himself as a sun-lover (i.e., one to have a genuine affinity with the sun, even if it leads to madness).
This is the second kind of knowledge; a completely different state from the one in which the holidaymaker warms his skin in the sun:
"Here, at the second level, there is already a kind of communion with the sun. Peruse Van Gogh's letters; it's obvious that when he is painting these huge red suns, it's obvious that this is what he is. Not that the sun is brought down to him; it's he who begins to enter into a kind of communication with the sun."
VI.
And what about the third manner of relating to the sun and the third kind of solar knowledge?
It's here that Deleuze turns to Lawrence's poetry and fiction in which the sun plays a central role and there is what might generally by called in abstract terms "a mystical union" between man and sun.
For Deleuze, this union with the sun is not a religious metaphor and nor is it a question of identification, even if it allows one to affirm the sun as God and to become a sun-man or sun-woman, opening like a flower before the sun and belonging to the sun and able to declare:
I am that I am
from the sun,
and people are not my measure. [6]
Deleuze notes that only when one attains this third kind of knowledge, does one arrive at this mode of intrinsic distinction. And as a result of this: "the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect
myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun
that affect me".
In other words, it's a game of solar auto-affection - not identification; "the internal distinction between his own singular essence, the singular essence of the sun, and the essence of the world" is maintained in Lawrence's work.
Reading Lawrence's late texts on the sun, Deleuze informs his students, "can trigger an understanding of Spinoza that you would never have had if you had stayed solely with Spinoza" - which is why, of course, in order to understand any philosopher - not just Spinoza - one needs to read literature and study art and "accumulate a thousand other things as well that have value by themselves".
VII.
And so, in sum ...
Van Gogh has unique experience with the sun, as proved by his paintings; and from Lawrence's writings we learn that he too had "a
special involvement with the sun".
Notes
[1] Deleuze uses the term enculage to describe his preferred method of engaging with other authors. This is usually translated into English as buggery, though I think I would use the more contemporary-sounding (if more vulgar) assfucking:
"I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child
that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important
to me to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I
had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it
resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden
emissions that I really enjoyed."
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans, Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.
[2] Lines from Lawrence's poem 'Sun-Men', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), pp. 149-150.
I thought they not only anticipated the text to follow, but also related to the sun-drenched portrait of Deleuze and Lawrence above, bearing in mind the title (explained in note 1 above) and Lawrence's use of the phrase uncringing buttocks.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, 'Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought' (Session 14, 24 March 1981), transcribed by Sandra Tomassi and Madeleine Manifacier, augmented by Charles J. Stivale, English translation by Timothy S. Murphy (for Web Deleuze); augmented by Charles J. Stivale.
All quotations from Deleuze in this post are from this work as it appears online. Click here to read courtesy of The Deleuze Seminars project, which aims to translate into English Deleuze's seminar-lectures given at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis, between 1971 and 1987, and to make them freely available.
[4] See my essay 'Sun-Fucked', which is available to read on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website under the title 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (14 Jan 2019): click here.
For those who don't fancy such a long read may prefer to see the two short posts published on Torpedo the Ark extracted from the above essay: click here and here.
[5] See the post written on Van Gogh's ear and the dangers of sun-gazing (25 Jan 2014): click here.
[6] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the Sun', by D. H. lawrence, in Pansies (1929), p. 152.
